While including photos in learning materials is a noble idea, including stolen photos in them is not. If you just copy and paste any photo you find on the web into your lesson, you might be a thief. Teachers need to know the rules of copyright, the principle of fair use, CC licences and so on. But they also have a variety of free resources if they want to include photos in their learning materials. This article presents seven of them.

It’s hard to teach and practice innovation in the classroom, but it’s the only way to prepare for and thrive in the world of tomorrow. Teachers that steal ideas from various sources, try to predict the future of education and let room for mistakes will find that innovative ideas are everywhere. And these ideas can change the school organizational system, pedagogy methods, learning content and eve the physical learning space for the better.

A low hanging fruit when it comes to including more visual elements in education is the organization of learning materials. all the learning materials teachers create are organized in a visual manner, things will be clearer for students and easier for teachers in the long-run. While it doesn’t take much effort to include visual elements when organizing lessons and ideas, the results are positive.

If in kindergarten and primary school all textbooks have at least one picture or diagram on almost every page, in senior years of high school and then in college, visual elements in textbooks and other learning materials become a rarity. That’s a shame, because students learn better when they can visualize new concepts. A picture may not be worth exactly a thousand words, but it’s definitely worth more than one.